Case Number 13604

Sight

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All Rise...

Judge David Johnson sees dead people. But only once. And it was after that he spent that night in a condemned chemical plant for a bet.

The Charge

He's not just seeing things.

Opening Statement

Another day, another Lions Gate horror movie, another slice of valuable
bandwidth consumed.

Facts of the Case

Jeffrey (Clayton Haske) is a tormented man living a neurotic life. The reason
for his neuroses: the relentless visions of acne-riddled ghosts, specters that
haunt him in the middle of the day and the middle of the night. Ever since he
was a young boy, Jeffrey's been harassed by ill-tempered ghosts, and this has
led to a reclusive personality and a short temper.

But things start to look up when a meets a woman named Dana who, amazingly,
shares Jeffrey's knack for seeing dead people. The two hit it off immediately,
and she asks him is he wants to deliver food to old people and of course he says
yes and then he meets her burly, jealous ex-boyfriend who would later beat him
to a pulp and when Jeffrey recuperates Dana's gone and he takes it upon himself
to find her.

The Evidence

Sight is slow…and green…kind of like an obese Kermit the
Frog. This is a supernatural/psychological thriller that plods along, more
cerebral and methodical than thrilling, plus it's filmed entirely in a
washed-out green color palette. The sum reaction for this judge: slightly
annoying.

But the movie does a few things well, keeping it from being a complete
optical disc abortion. For one, there's Clayton Haske. Now that name meant
nothing to me before this film and I'll almost certainly forget it a week from
now, but the guy impressed me. He's on the screen maybe 98 percent of the time,
by far shouldering the biggest responsibility for keeping this thing moving
forward. And despite the film's lumbering pace, he manages to come away
unscathed. Jeffrey is a whacked-out guy who's lived a life full of supernatural
emotional abuse and Haske translates that well in a slow-burn type of
performance. The story gets hairier towards the end and while I'm not digging
the over-convoluted "twist" ending, Haske raises his game admirably to
match with the heightened intensity level.

What else works here? The jump scares are pretty cool. Writer/director Adam
Ahlbrandt has a good grasp of the art of the jump scare, and the ghost makeup
effects are quite effective. Pointy teeth, blood trails on the corners of the
mouth, custom contact lenses, all of it mixed with the typical lightning-fast
camera work designed to elicit as many cheap shocks as possible. And in the
beginning, it worked OK. But it soon became apparent that these ghostly jumps
were all that Sight had in its repertoire. By the time the film ended I
was exhausted and exasperated by the over-reliance on these tactics. Too much of
a good thing and all that…

And that concludes everything I have of substance to say of this film.

The disc: 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, 2.0 stereo, both of which are
sufficient and adequate and that's it. No extras.

Closing Statement

A well-acted horror film that relies too heavily on the jump scare and a
twist ending that fails to wow, Sight probably isn't worth taking a look
at.

The Verdict

For the charge of First Degree Spinach Tinting, the accused is found
guilty.